The Public School Nightmare:

Why fix a system designed to destroy individual thought?

by John Taylor Gatto
(all rights reserved)

I want you to consider the frightening possibility that we are spending far
too much money on schooling, not too little. I want you to consider that we have too many
people employed in interfering with the way children grow up  and that all this
money and all these people, all the time we take out of children's lives and away from
their homes and families and neighborhoods and private explorations  gets in the way
of education.

That seems radical, I know. Surely in modern technological society it is the quantity
of schooling and the amount of money you spend on it that buys value. And yet last year in
St. Louis, I heard a vice-president of IBM tell an audience of people assembled to
redesign the process of teacher certification that in his opinion this country became
computer-literate by self-teaching, not through any action of schools. He said 45 million
people were comfortable with computers who had learned through dozens of non-systematic
strategies, none of them very formal; if schools had pre-empted the right to teach
computer use we would be in a horrible mess right now instead of leading the world in this
literacy. Now think about Sweden, a beautiful, healthy, prosperous and up-to-date country
with a spectacular reputation for quality in everything it produces. It makes sense to
think their schools must have something to do with that.

Then what do you make of the fact that you can't go to school in Sweden until you are 7
years old? The reason the unsentimental Swedes have wiped out what would be first and
seconds grades here is that they don't want to pay the large social bill that quickly
comes due when boys and girls are ripped away from their best teachers at home too early.

It just isn't worth the price, say the Swedes, to provide jobs for teachers and
therapists if the result is sick, incomplete kids who can't be put back together again
very easily. The entire Swedish school sequence isn't 12 years, either  it's nine.
Less schooling, not more. The direct savings of such a step in the US would be $75-100
billion, a lot of unforeclosed home mortgages, a lot of time freed up with which to seek
an education.

Who was it that decided to force your attention onto Japan instead of Sweden? Japan
with its long school year and state compulsion, instead of Sweden with its short school
year, short school sequence, and free choice where your kid is schooled? Who decided you
should know about Japan and not Hong Kong, an Asian neighbor with a short school year that
outperforms Japan across the board in math and science? Whose interests are served by
hiding that from you?

One of the principal reasons we got into the mess we're in is that we allowed schooling
to become a very profitable monopoly, guaranteed its customers by the police power of the
state. Systematic schooling attracts increased investment only when it does poorly, and
since there are no penalties at all for such performance, the temptation not to do well is
overwhelming. That's because school staffs, both line and management, are involved in a
guild system; in that ancient form of association no single member is allowed to
outperform any other member, is allowed to advertise or is allowed to introduce new
technology or improvise without the advance consent of the guild. Violation of these
precepts is severely sanctioned  as Marva Collins, Jaime Escalante and a large
number of once-brilliant teachers found out.

The guild reality cannot be broken without returning primary decision-making to
parents, letting them buy what they want to buy in schooling, and encouraging the
entrepreneurial reality that existed until 1852. That is why I urge any business to think
twice before entering a cooperative relationship with the schools we currently have.
Cooperating with these places will only make them worse.

The structure of American schooling, 20th century style, began in 1806 when Napoleon's
amateur soldiers beat the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When
your business is selling soldiers, losing a battle like that is serious. Almost
immediately afterwards a German philosopher named Fichte delivered his famous
"Address to the German Nation" which became one of the most influential
documents in modern history. In effect he told the Prussian people that the party was
over, that the nation would have to shape up through a new Utopian institution of forced
schooling in which everyone would learn to take orders.

So the world got compulsion schooling at the end of a state bayonet for the first time
in human history; modern forced schooling started in Prussia in 1819 with a clear vision
of what centralized schools could deliver:

Obedient soldiers to the army; Obedient workers to the mines; Well subordinated civil
servants to government; Well subordinated clerks to industry Citizens who thought alike
about major issues.

Schools should create an artificial national consensus on matters that had been worked
out in advance by leading German families and the head of institutions. Schools should
create unity among all the German states, eventually unifying them into Greater Prussia.

Prussian industry boomed from the beginning. She was successful in warfare and her
reputation in international affairs was very high. Twenty-six years after this form of
schooling began, the King of Prussia was invited to North America to determine the
boundary between the United States and Canada. Thirty-three years after that fateful
invention of the central school institution, as the behest of Horace Mann and many other
leading citizens, we borrowed the style of Prussian schooling as our own.

You need to know this because over the first 50 years of our school institution
Prussian purpose  which was to create a form of state socialism  gradually
forced out traditional American purpose, which in most minds was to prepare the individual
to be self-reliant.

In Prussia the purpose of the Volksshule, which educated 92 percent of the children,
was not intellectual development at all, but socialization in obedience and subordination.
Thinking was left to the Real Schulen, in which 8 percent of the kids participated. But
for the great mass, intellectual development was regarded with managerial horror, as
something that caused armies to lose battles.

Prussia concocted a method based on complex fragmentations to ensure that its school
products would fit the grand social design. Some of this method involved dividing whole
ideas into school subjects, each further divisible, some of it involved short periods
punctuated by a horn so that self-motivation in study would be muted by ceaseless
interruptions.

There were many more techniques of training, but all were built around the premise that
isolation from first-hand information, and fragmentation of the abstract information
presented by teachers, would result in obedient and subordinate graduates, properly
respectful of arbitrary orders. "Lesser" men would be unable to interfere with
policy makers because, while they could still complain, they could not manage sustained or
comprehensive thought. Well-schooled children cannot think critically, cannot argue
effectively.

One of the most interesting by-products of Prussian schooling turned out to be the two
most devastating wars of modern history. Erich Maria Ramarque, in his classic "All
Quiet on the Western Front" tells us that the First World War was caused by the
tricks of schoolmasters, and the famous Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer said
that the Second World War was the inevitable product of good schooling.

It's important to underline that Bonhoeffer meant that literally, not metaphorically
 schooling after the Prussian fashion removes the ability of the mind to think for
itself. It teaches people to wait for a teacher to tell them what to do and if what they
have done is good or bad. Prussian teaching paralyses the moral will as well as the
intellect. It's true that sometimes well-schooled students sound smart, because they
memorize many opinions of great thinkers, but they actually are badly damaged because
their own ability to think is left rudimentary and undeveloped. We got from the United
States to Prussia and back because a small number of very passionate ideological leaders
visited Prussia in the first half of the 19th century, and fell in love with the order,
obedience and efficiency of its system and relentlessly proselytized for a translation of
Prussian vision onto these shores.

If Prussia's ultimate goal was the unification of Germany, our major goal, so these men
thought, was the unification of hordes of immigrant Catholics into a national consensus
based on a northern European cultural model. To do that children would have to be removed
from their parents and from inappropriate cultural influence. In this fashion, compulsion
schooling, a bad idea that had been around at least since Plato's "Republic", a
bad idea that New England had tried to enforce in 1650 without any success, was finally
rammed through the Massachusetts legislature in 1852. It was, of course, the famous
"Know-Nothing" legislature that passed this law, a legislature that was the
leading edge of a famous secret society which flourished at that time known as "The
Order of the Star Spangled Banner," whose password was the simple sentence, "I
know nothing"  hence the popular label attached to the secret society's
political arm, "The American Party." Over the next 50 years state after state
followed suit, ending schools of choice and ceding the field to a new government monopoly.

There was one powerful exception to this  the children who could afford to be
privately educated. It's important to note that the underlying premise of Prussian
schooling is that the government is the true parent of children  the State is
sovereign over the family. At the most extreme pole of this notion is the idea that
biological parents are really the enemies of their own children, not to be trusted. How
did a Prussian system of dumbing children down take hold in American schools?

Thousands and thousands of young men from prominent American families journeyed to
Prussia and other parts of Germany during the 19th century and brought home the Ph. D.
degree to a nation in which such a credential was unknown. These men pre-empted the top
positions in the academic world, in corporate research, and in government, to the point
where opportunity was almost closed to those who had not studied in Germany, or who were
not the direct disciples of a German PhD, as John Dewey was the disciple of G. Stanley
Hall at Johns Hopkins. Virtually every single one of the founders of American schooling
had made the pilgrimage to Germany, and many of these men wrote widely circulated reports
praising the Teutonic methods. Horace Mann's famous "7th Report" of 1844, still
available in large libraries, was perhaps the most important of these.

By 1889, a little more than 100 years ago, the crop was ready for harvest. It that year
the US Commissioner of Education, William Torrey Harris, assured a railroad magnate,
Collis Huntington, that American schools were "scientifically designed" to
prevent "over-education" from happening. The average American would be content
with his humble role in life, said the commissioner, because he would not be tempted to
think about any other role. My guess is that Harris meant he would not be able to think
about any other role. In 1896 the famous John Dewey, then at the University of Chicago,
said that independent, self-reliant people were a counter-productive anachronism in the
collective society of the future. In modern society, said Dewey, people would be defined
by their associations  not by their own individual accomplishments.

It such a world people who read too well or too early are dangerous because they become
privately empowered, they know too much, and know how to find out what they don't know by
themselves, without consulting experts. Dewey said the great mistake of traditional
pedagogy was to make reading and writing constitute the bulk of early schoolwork. He
advocated that the phonics method of teaching reading be abandoned and replaced by the
whole word method, not because the latter was more efficient (he admitted that it was less
efficient) but because independent thinkers were produced by hard books, thinkers who
cannot be socialized very easily. By socialization Dewey meant a program of social
objectives administered by the best social thinkers in government.

This was a giant step on the road to state socialism, the form pioneered in Prussia,
and it is a vision radically disconnected with the American past, its historic hopes and
dreams. Dewey's former professor and close friend, G. Stanley Hall, said this at about the
same time, "Reading should no longer be a fetish. Little attention should be paid to
reading." Hall was one of the three men most responsible for building a gigantic
administrative infrastructure over the classroom. How enormous that structure really
became can only be understood by comparisons: New York State, for instance, employs more
school administrators than all of the European Economic Community nations combined.

Once you think that the control of conduct is what schools are about, the word
"reform" takes on a very particular meaning. It means making adjustments to the
machine so that young subjects will not twist and turn so, while their minds and bodies
are being scientifically controlled. Helping kids to use their minds better is beside the
point. Bertrand Russell once observed that American schooling was among the most radical
experiments in human history, that America was deliberately denying its children the tools
of critical thinking. When you want to teach children to think, you begin by treating them
seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly,
providing privacy and solitude for them, and making them readers and thinkers of
significant thoughts from the beginning. That's if you want to teach them to think.

There is no evidence that this has been a State purpose since the start of compulsion
schooling. When Frederich Froebel, the inventor of kindergarten in 19th century Germany,
fashioned his idea he did not have a "garden for children" in mind, but a
metaphor of teachers as gardeners and children as the vegetables. Kindergarten was created
to be a way to break the influence of mothers on their children. I note with interest the
growth of daycare in the US and the repeated urgings to extend school downward to include
4-year-olds.

The movement toward state socialism is not some historical curiosity but a powerful
dynamic force in the world around us. It is fighting for its life against those forces
which would, through vouchers or tax credits, deprive it of financial lifeblood, and it
has countered this thrust with a demand for even more control over children's lives, and
even more money to pay for the extended school day and year that this control requires.

A movement as visibly destructive to individuality, family and community as
government-system schooling has been might be expected to collapse in the face of its
dismal record, coupled with an increasingly aggressive shake down of the taxpayer, but
this has not happened. The explanation is largely found in the transformation of schooling
from a simple service to families and towns to an enormous, centralized corporate
enterprise.

While this development has had a markedly adverse effect on people and on our
democratic traditions, it has made schooling the single largest employer in the United
States, and the largest grantor of contracts next to the Defense Department. Both of these
low-visibility phenomena provide monopoly schooling with powerful political friends,
publicists, advocates and other useful allies. This is a large part of the explanation why
no amount of failure ever changes things in schools, or changes them for very long. School
people are in a position to outlast any storm and to keep short-attention-span public
scrutiny thoroughly confused.

An overview of the short history of this institution reveals a pattern marked by
intervals of public outrage, followed by enlargement of the monopoly in every case.

After nearly 30 years spent inside a number of public schools, some considered good,
some bad, I feel certain that management cannot clean its own house. It relentlessly
marginalizes all significant change. There are no incentives for the "owners" of
the structure to reform it, nor can there be without outside competition.

What is needed for several decades is the kind of wildly-swinging free market we had at
the beginning of our national history. It cannot be overemphasized that no body of theory
exists to accurately define the way children learn, or which learning is of most worth. By
pretending the existence of such we have cut ourselves off from the information and
innovation that only a real market can provide. Fortunately our national situation has
been so favorable, so dominant through most of our history, that the margin of error
afforded has been vast.

But the future is not so clear. Violence, narcotic addictions, divorce, alcoholism,
loneliness...all these are but tangible measures of a poverty in education. Surely
schools, as the institutions monopolizing the daytimes of childhood, can be called to
account for this. In a democracy the final judges cannot be experts, but only the people.

Trust the people, give them choices, and the school nightmare will vanish in a
generation.